21/02/2026
Einstein didn't work and study in the traditional way, but rather took many naps, played violin, took long walks, and daydreamed. He believed all these boosted creativity and cognitive function, but also valued these as inherent joys.
Einstein was famous on campus for taking long daily walks in Princeton, typically in the woods or through residential streets. Einstein saw rest, long walks, and playing violin as vital to his creative process. "If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music... I get most joy in life out of my violin." (Albert Einstein, in a 1929 interview with George Sylvester Viereck). Notice he links his creativity to his music but, crucially, his violin was an inherent joy, in fact here he says it was his main joy.
His second wife, Elsa, noted: "Music helps him when he is thinking about his theories. He goes to his study, comes back, strikes a few chords on the piano, jots something down, returns to his study."
On taking walks, he wrote in a letter to his youngest son (Eduard, written in German June 1918): "Make a lot of walks to get healthy and don't read that much but save yourself some until you're grown up."
Einstein didn't worry about wasting time. He believed that forcing work was less productive than allowing the mind to wander. "Creativity is the residue of time wasted."
He was a virtuoso daydreamer.
Einstein's daydreaming (sounds better than "Gedankenexperiments") were his imaginative thought experiments, mental simulations he used to break from classical mechanics and visualize complex physics, driving his revolution in science. Through deep, often solitary, visualization—like chasing light or imagining falling elevators—he established the foundations for special and general relativity.
